[Election-Methods] Methods to prevent ghost voting?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 04:26 PM 8/31/2007, mrouse1 at mrouse.com wrote:
>Several people have worked on preventing selling, removing, or altering
>votes (Ronald Rivest, Warren Smith, and others). I probably have
>overlooked it, but has there been any work done on preventing people from
>*adding* fraudulent votes -- the infamous "Chicago voting" problem, where
>cemeteries rise en mass to vote for their favored candidate? It's an
>interesting problem, since it seems applicable to preventing ticket fraud
>and counterfeiting as well as vote fraud.

Well, adding votes is much easier to detect than vote alteration 
fraud, because voter registrations and the identity of those who 
voted are both public record.

What strikes me is that there should be a way of verifying the true 
identity of someone who registers to vote. Some countries require a 
fingerprint to vote. That would do it.

(It does not create a privacy issue; there is no right to vote 
without identity. I'd restrict the use of fingerprints from voter 
registrations for the investigation of fraud, not for identifying a 
person from their fingerprints unless that person fraudulently 
registered as someone else.... What this would require is a 
registration process where the registrar personally attests to the 
fingerprint as being that of the registrant.)